mm2 is directly proportional to BOM cost and minimum profitable selling price. Intels software and hardware is much less efficient than nvidia so their products cost more to make and sell for less. Battlemage is at best break even, with alchemist they lost money. If they want to stay in business they need to raise their ASP. Since no one is buying intel for their games support they need to find a new market, thus SRIOV and local LLM. Unlike nvidia they don't need to worry about cannibalizing other business units.
On the die size argument, which I see being echoed a lot online:
Why would a customer care or factor that into their purchasing decisions? Saying that these dGPUs with large dies are what is going to put Intel out of business is ludicrous and the Xe cores are shared amongst many of Intel's most lucrative products.
You can afford larger dies on N4 compared to when the 40-series were launched. It's no longer the leading edge node and yields have likely improved.
dGPUs have pretty expensive GDDR modules, I do not have data on the exact proportion but I would bet that the memory modules is the more important line item.
BoM matters less on lower volume (compared to mobile SoCs) dGPU units. Masks masks, R&D and validation are big fixed up-front costs.
Recurring software support is also independent of how many units get sold. Xe cores are shared by many Intel products (client & server CPUs, datacenter GPUs and gaming GPUs).
B580 is widely popular for gamers, Intel cannot keep up the demand at the moment. I doubt they need to unlock SRIOV on the gaming segment dGPUs to get rid of stock, as you seem to suggest. Their datacenter GPUs [1] offer support for SRIOV, as you probably already know, so I assume you are bemoaning market segmentation.
throwaway48476|11 months ago
yvdriess|11 months ago
On the die size argument, which I see being echoed a lot online:
Why would a customer care or factor that into their purchasing decisions? Saying that these dGPUs with large dies are what is going to put Intel out of business is ludicrous and the Xe cores are shared amongst many of Intel's most lucrative products.
You can afford larger dies on N4 compared to when the 40-series were launched. It's no longer the leading edge node and yields have likely improved.
dGPUs have pretty expensive GDDR modules, I do not have data on the exact proportion but I would bet that the memory modules is the more important line item.
BoM matters less on lower volume (compared to mobile SoCs) dGPU units. Masks masks, R&D and validation are big fixed up-front costs.
Recurring software support is also independent of how many units get sold. Xe cores are shared by many Intel products (client & server CPUs, datacenter GPUs and gaming GPUs).
B580 is widely popular for gamers, Intel cannot keep up the demand at the moment. I doubt they need to unlock SRIOV on the gaming segment dGPUs to get rid of stock, as you seem to suggest. Their datacenter GPUs [1] offer support for SRIOV, as you probably already know, so I assume you are bemoaning market segmentation.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLK_i-TQ3kQ -- Wendell's video on Flex 170 GPU from Intel - Subscription Free GPU Accelerated VDI on Proxmox 8.1
sitkack|11 months ago
What is says is that given the die area, Intel fails to capitalize on their chip relative to a 4070.
throwaway48476|11 months ago